I'm a French entrepreneur, who moved to Finland in 2004 to specialize in mobile and online business.
Earlier this week when Google Buzz came out, my initial impressions were quite negative.
I’ll try explain my thoughts on the service, and why I think it will be a winner.
My main gripes with the service so far:
1) Lack of friends
This is the major issue with the service. I have lots of friends on Facebook and Twitter.
Why would I spend time migrating all my friends from each service there, just to get very similar functionality?
2) Super difficult RSS integration
I tried for a few hours to integrate custom RSS feeds. It’s so straightforward on Friendfeed, why not on Buzz?
In the end I just gave up and put my Friendfeed in Buzz. Let’s just hope Facebook doesn’t pull the plug on Friendfeed until Google fixes the issue.
3) There is no standalone page
Right now you have to keep bouncing between Gmail and your Google Profile like an idiot :)
It’d be nice to have this somewhat centralized.
4) Privacy concerns?
To be honest, I stopped worrying about privacy when I started becoming more active on Facebook.
However, I’m not thrilled about the idea of receiving spam because of Buzz.
Why do I think Buzz will be a winner then?
1) Early adopters
It’s pretty impressive that most of my Twitter contacts are already on Buzz.
It shouldn’t have been a surprise though. Twitter is mostly early adopters, power users, whatever you wanna call them. As a result, leaving Twitter doesn’t seem so bad now.
2) More than Twitter and Friendfeed (but less than Facebook)
Unlike Twitter, it’s more than just text. Comments are threaded. You can reply in Gmail. You can post pics and videos. It can do pretty much all that Friendfeed can, or at least has the potential to do so.
I also like the more advanced features like search, the “people near you” feature.
3) Service integration
Buzz is integrated in Reader (that’s partly a down side as well), Maps, Gmail, Contacts, Profile.
Twitter is integrated in nothing.
4) Let’s be friends
At the end of the day, it’s not so difficult to add friends again. We’ve all done this in the past when we joined FB and Twitter. So let’s be friends :)
February 13, 2010 at 18:16
the big win for buzz is that it is a version 2 of something, built by a new team, but with advice from the old one.
Everyone I have spoken to says something like, “it’s nice to have Jaiku back”
While buzz might not be the most popular thing out there, in the long run it will always be popular as it is designed to interoperate with *everything* via various open web standards it is supporting and championing (see the API docs for the list).
The future is not in silo or standalone systems but in federated systems
February 13, 2010 at 21:14
[...] Nice little article by a fellow Google Buzzer Ramine Darabiha via his site Ramine.net [...]
February 14, 2010 at 20:56
But how does that all fit into the internets being a series of tubes?
//sami